…my passion for underwater photography started at the age of 17 in Greece. In the summer of ’07 whilst being on holidays with my parents on Crete I took with me a disposable Kodak waterproof camera. I was always snorkeling and mesmerized by the world underwater and my aim that year was to record it. I had so much fun in doing that – never could I envision that that happiness is still  present in my curent work. Actually, it found even more depth: “The Work” has organically developed in a philosophy and became an expresion of who I am and what I deem important enough to share.

The big turn in my style of underwater photography came in the summer of ’18 out of experimentation. This particular summer I was with my wife at the island of Skopelos, Greece but I simply got lost interest of seeing the same fishes. At a certain point the joy was fading away but I wasn’t realizing that at that moment. But then something grabbed my attention: a leaf of an olive tree, freely floating in the water. It had a silver shine around it and it reflected the sun as bright as a silver mirror. I was taken away by the simple beauty of it all and unfortionatly I didn’t manage to make a photo of it but this was the start of this project.

In the following days I started to take all types of flowers (especially roses) out of the garden of the apartment complex in which we stayed. I was putting them in a plastic bag, with a stone inside and taking it with all of my equipment into the Aegean Sea. I was struggling but eventually I managed to create some kind of work flow handling the wet flowers, trying to keep them as still as possible under water with one hand whilst holding the camera in another.

In that alien space there is just less light, the most essential aspect of photography. If you want to shoot photos underwater you need to change all the settings on your camera to find the sweet spot: I move, my subject moves so all camera settings need to take that into consideration. Whilst stopping down in order to get a good result, my pictures became darker, more mysterious. I noticed that the pedals of the older roses had a more intense shine and reflection then the new, young and fresh roses did. This created the first shots of submerged roses…